Seventeenth-century critics thought Ben Jonson England’s finest writer. Even until the mid-18th century he was conventionally regarded as at least Shakespeare’s equal. It was he more than anyone who won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities. He was Britain’s first literary celebrity, at least to judge by the throng that hailed him outside Berwick as he journeyed to Scotland on foot in 1618 – though he went not for charity, as he might today, but (it seems) for a bet.

His early reputation is now a surprise. His poems, though frequently studied in universities, are less often read outside them. They are rarely loved as much as Shakespeare’s sonnets or the verse of Jonson’s friend John Donne. His plays are a different matter. Among his contemporaries no dramatist other than Shakespeare has overtaken him. The depictions in his comedies of social and economic fantasy, and of their exploitation, have never seemed more pertinent than amid our financial convulsions. Where would a character called Madoff have been more at home? Nonetheless, Shakespeare, the rival of whom Jonson wrote with magnanimous prescience that he was not of an age but for all time, has left him far behind. Only a few of Jonson’s plays, Volpone, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair and perhaps Epicene, are performed with any frequency. The impulse to rescue him from undervaluation runs beneath these new publications. The almost simultaneous appearance of a major biography and a major edition is no accident, for the writing of Ian Donaldson’s Life became entwined with the seven-volume collection of Jonson’s writings, of which Donaldson has been one of the triumvirate of general editors. Frequently, the two enterprises echo each other’s claims.

The attitude that does most to bind them is a suspicion of what both of them call Jonson’s ‘idealised’ image of himself. How many poets name themselves so often or write so many verses to or about themselves? He wishes to be seen as the embodiment of, and as the forthright spokesman for, an unchanging set of elevated principles. Donaldson warns us against taking his ‘tactical declarations of personal constancy and imperturbability’ at face value. We should attend to the ‘shifts, transformations, experiments, back-trackings and inconsistencies’ detectable in ‘the serpentine progress of his professional career’. If that premise deserves credit for the stringency of Donaldson’s questioning of the biographical material it has more than earned its keep. There has been no more authoritative or assured biography of a Renaissance writer, and none that has more successfully brought historical and literary insights together. If Donaldson’s self-effacing prose (so un-Jonsonian a quality) and the quietness of his reasoning may occasionally obscure the novelty and penetration of his narrative, there is no missing the surges of power when he tackles hitherto unyielding biographical mysteries. The reasons for Jonson’s journey to Scotland are one such high point, his appearance before James I when his friend the historian John Selden was in trouble another.

Most searching of all is the account of Jonson’s relations with his fellow Catholics before and during the Gunpowder Plot of 1605; of the troubles with authority that arose from them; and of their bearing on his writing. Here as elsewhere a familiar but hazy landscape is clarified and in the process transformed. Until now no one has adequately confronted two terrifying moments in Jonson’s life. First, why did the satire of James I’s Scottish favourites in the play Eastward Ho! a few months before the plot provoke such a fierce reaction, and why was he imprisoned and threatened with physical mutilation? Second, when and why was he charged, apparently before the Privy Council, with ‘popery and treason’? Though no proof is possible, Donaldson finds in Jonson’s Catholicism, and in the suspicions it provoked, a thread which alone gives consistency to the evidence.

Modern literary criticism has been slower to recognise the religious preoccupations of Renaissance writers than their political ones. Jonson converted to Catholicism in 1598, during an earlier imprisonment. He detested the methods of interrogation and surveillance that were practised against his new co-religionists. He supped with conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot only weeks before the attempted coup. It is unlikely that he gave encouragement to the plotters. As far as we know, he always sided with the party among the Catholics which renounced sedition. Yet the tensions between loyalty to king and country on one hand and his Catholic faith and friendships on the other took acute practical forms at a time of grave national emergency. The discovery of the plot was a turning point in his life and in his art. He quickly distanced himself from the conspiracy, helped the government try to penetrate it, and began attending Anglican services. Donaldson notes that in the years after the plot the terms ‘patriot’, ‘public good’, ‘common good’ and ‘commonwealth’ appear with growing frequency in his writings. Any true religion, he insisted, would complement and sustain those secular ideals. He injected the theme into the Roman tragedy Catiline His Conspiracy, which was written in 1611, the year after his final renunciation of Catholicism, and in which ‘the public good’ is served by those who grasp that ‘no religion binds men to be traitors.’

Donaldson superannuates simple dichotomies which have represented Jonson as a friend or critic of the establishment, or as an unqualified and consistent advocate or adversary of any particular political programme. Like many people he took now one point of view and then another, and looked now to one ally or patron and then another. He groped his way through the great debates over parliamentary authority and Jacobean foreign policy and, late in his life, through the crises of political and religious authority under Charles I, a period which Donaldson and the edition portray as one of neglected literary achievement on Jonson’s part.

Letters

Ben Jonson was not in fact hailed by a ‘throng’ outside Berwick on his walk to Scotland in 1618, as Blair Worden states (LRB, 11 October). A recently discovered account written by a fellow traveller suggests that the poet’s reception there was of a different order. Culverins were ‘mounted’ and the bells rung at his approach, as an overture to three days of – as the account puts it – ‘royal’ entertainment. On his departure northwards he was accompanied by ‘all the knights, gentlemen, Mayor and Aldermen’ as far as the border, where glasses of wine and a volley of shot from a company of musketeers marked his passage from England into Scotland. Such celebratory displays of hospitality were repeated often along the journey, in towns and cities as well as at grand country houses. Sometimes, a more intimate note was sounded: at Howick, in Northumberland, the walkers were sent on their way with a ‘merrybub’, or Marybud, from a lady’s maid ‘for our farewell’, while at North Berwick a piper and a posse of dancing shearers made them welcome. On other occasions the crowds of which Worden speaks were indeed in evidence: at Royston, ‘the maids and young men came out of town to meet us,’ while at Edinburgh ‘the women in throngs ran to see us etc, some bringing sack and sugar, others aquavitae and sugar.’ At Pontefract, Jonson’s arrival even caused some health and safety issues:

All the town was up in throngs to see us, and there was dancing of giants, and music prepared to meet us. And notwithstanding we took a byway to escape the crowd and staring of the people yet a swarm of boys and others crossed over to overtake us, and pressed so upon us, that we were fain to present our pistols upon them to keep them back.

We are currently editing the ‘Foot Voyage’ account for publication as a pendant, of sorts, to the Cambridge Works. It paints a vivid picture of Jonson in his pomp, and provides a striking complement to the ‘Informations’ recorded by William Drummond a few months later. Here, he is genial, generous, expansive and hospitable, a grandly comic turn passing a festive summer with everyone from courtiers and noblemen to itinerant captains, drunken parsons and agricultural labourers, the whole enterprise fuelled by ale, claret, sack, burnt wine and hullock. Such a figure is perhaps difficult to reconcile with the severe moralist and demanding scholar remembered by some of his early admirers, but it does accord with the spirit and tone of much of his work and with the Ben Jonson commemorated in jest books and elsewhere far into the 18th century.

James Loxley &amp; Anna Groundwater; Julie Sanders
University of Edinburgh; University of Nottingham

I am grateful to Blair Worden for his review of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, of which I was one of the editors (LRB, 11 October). While praising Colin Burrow’s editing of the poems, he notes the absence of any general essay giving information about the scores of manuscripts to which Burrow’s collations make constant reference. This essay can in fact be read on the website for the edition, along with 65 essays by other contributors to the edition which thoroughly document the manuscripts and early printed texts lying behind Jonson’s plays, masques, prose works and collected volumes. These are all freely available, and will remain permanently accessible after the release of the electronic edition next year.